CHOSEN

by Linda Parsons

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

You, yes, you. On the porch glider of memory, 

thinking again of your grandmother’s grease-

stained kitchen and how she saved you. You, 

in the first snow of the year, the burdened photinia 

limbs, the night’s blue note. I mean you. You 

who’ve been griping and gnashing your teeth 

in the constant upheaval—not just our country’s 

bruised fist, but the world entire, its tectonics adrift. 

It was your idea, when the roll was called up yonder, 

to take up your pallet, to rise like Lazurus, 

his winding sheet of myrrh and aloe trailing behind. 

To say, Me, I’ll go. I’ll go to that time, that cliff 

and split sky, that rage of brother against brother 

against sister, unfriending right and left. 

Left from right. It’s my time. My time to be 

a lighthouse, to shine far and wide over veined 

stones and broken vows alike, though my heels 

bleed, my steps falter. My time to march 

on the winter streets and hold high my sign: 

God is watching you kill.

 

Remember 

your Ecclesiastes: Time and chance happen 

to us all. And what will you do with this time, 

this chance to sweep your beam along the rocky 

shoreline, to pull whoever outlasted the nor’easter 

back to breath? This is your time—to spend 

like a wastrel or shower the heavens with a gracious 

plenty. You engine of steam and plow. You 

shoulder to the squeaky wheel. You asked for it. 

You volunteered to help turn the tide 

and guide this mother home. 

 

Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville. 

LIFE AT LAND’S END

by Mary Eileen Knoff

In January, for thirty years, I have left behind
grey Seattle skies to sit beside the Pacific shore
at Land’s End, on the Baja’s southern tip,
seeking respite from the northern chill.

Each year, thunderous surf lashes the land,
crashing against its standing stone, La Roca,
filling the sky with mist and foam.
This year the scene turns my thoughts toward home:

there an explosion of presidential orders
overwhelms like a deluge, threatening
to reshape truth as surf reshapes the sand.
Can our country withstand the onslaught thrust upon us?

Many of us now cast about for a course
to follow through these treacherous times.

Life at Land’s End calls out to me through the fog:

Stand firm like this rock, persist like the tide
shine like lighthouses for those who ride on stormy seas.
Your words and deeds of truth and mercy will be guides,
like bright, shining stars in a blackening sky,
like rafts of life on fear and greed’s wicked seas.

Mary Eileen Knoff spent the first two decades of her professional life as an English teacher, editor, and freelance writer. In the mid-1990s she studied for pastoral ministry and then served as a spiritual companion and small group facilitator since the early 2000s. She has lived in Redmond, Washington near the foothills of the Cascades for the last thirty years. For the last decade I have been crafting a collection of poems about life on the pond that I call Ponderings. I am in search for a publisher of that collection these days. In 2012, as part of a doctoral program in ministry, she collected, edited, and published writings by myself and others, now in a second edition, called Seasoning the Soul: Meditations for the Celtic Year.